And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States, and in the 1940s, the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.Įven in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it-and what our clothing means. The Renaissance-era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility, and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order.
Merchants dressing like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change and dress codes, a way to maintain political control.
But then, in the late 18th century, over the course of about three decades, “men throughout Europe abandoned the styles that had signified wealth and power for centuries,” writes Richard Thompson Ford in “ Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.” “In their place, elite men adopted the sober, self-abnegating garb anticipated by Thomas More in ‘Utopia’ and first favored by religious Puritans: simple wool and linen in sober hues of dark blue, brown, gray, and black.” This was later described as the “Great Masculine Renunciation,” and it’s a constant theme in Ford’s thoughtful history of the rules and rituals of attire.A “sharp and entertaining” ( The Wall Street Journal) exploration of fashion through the ages that asks what our clothing reveals about ourselves and our society.ĭress codes are as old as clothing itself.
They wore bold colors and luxurious silhouettes and shimmering fabrics. For a good portion of human history, they were flamboyant in their dress, prone to peacocking their social rank, financial success and sexual prowess from 100 paces. Men were not always inclined toward minimalism.
Centuries have gone into the making of these rules and assumptions - and a bit of sleight of hand, as well.
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